Psychologist Alexander Lescziak savors a life of quiet sophistication on Manhattan's Upper West Side, but his marriage has become stale and he has an unethical attraction to a young patient. When a new patient declares that he is the product of a union between Lescziak's Jewish mother and a German prisoner of war, Lescziak is finally jolted out of his complacency: As despair and pain close in, he escapes into the recesses of his imagination, where his mother's affair with the German prisoner comes to life in precise, gorgeous detail. It is here that A Memory of War unfolds into a romance -- and the past becomes intermingled with the present.